Irina Uk- Founder of Blended World

Ed.M. Harvard University; M.S. DePaul University

Creative Code Teaching Artist

Although Irina took a few courses in HTML and C++ in high school and during her undergrad studies, her interest in coding grew years later when she began to teach kids between the ages of 8 and 18 how to code for the Digital Media Academy. Irina started by teaching Scratch, a programming language for kids. Then, she taught herself Processing, Java in Eclipse and Javascript in order to enrich her programming instruction. In the process, she fell in love with creative coding, a discipline in which she could combine her left and right brain functions, the mathematical/ logical and the emotional to create works of art. Now, Irina enjoys designing code education programs, teaching and creating her own artwork with code. Some of her recent projects in the creative coding education include:

Digital Media Academy: developing the Made by Girls: Adventured in Programming course curriculum, an introductory coding course exclusively for 8 to 12 year old girls, to be taught at twenty one locations nationwide; teaches programming and wearable tech intensives to students between 8 and 18 years old

Artisan Asylum: developing and facilitating a creative code workshop series for adults

Lesley STEAM Lab: leads a coding club for Cambridge Public School Pre K-5th grade students, incorporating animation, game design, robotics and circuitry

Harvard Ed Portal: developed the Creative Coding Studio curriculum for 3rd-6th grade students, designed a training for program instructors, trained the first group of instructors and helped facilitate the first program

Speyer School: designed and facilitated the programming component of C.A.M.P., a summer program involving chess, architecture, math and programming for K-5th grade students

Prior to becoming involved with code education, Irina taught high school mathematics and led a Precalculus course team in a Chicago charter school for four years. Her success in helping students from urban settings achieve content mastery and pursue math related disciplines in college led to her participation in Harvard University’s Urban Scholars Program.Irina received her Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Technology, Innovation and Education in 2013. After graduating, she explored her interest in leveraging technology to improve education by designing learning technologies for companies such as HarvardX, CAST, IDC Herziliya’s Media Innovation Lab, Scholastic and Knewton. See more on herLinkedIn.